020 7898 0500Real wages continue to outpace inflation which should leave us all with a little bit more money in our pocket. Excluding bonuses, average earnings increased by 2.9% in the three months to March – the most since the three months to August 2015.
However, it wasn’t all good news yesterday, as we learned that UK productivity fell by 0.5% in the first quarter of 2018. It is also perhaps worth noting that average earnings including bonus fell from 2.8% in February to 2.6% in March. Ultimately, this means that workers will have to wait longer for real wages to recover and goes some way to justifying the BoE’s decision to keep rates on hold, in that inflation is unlikely to increase as a result.
There was also some alarming news regarding the number of EU nationals working in Britain. Over the course of the last year, the total EU workforce in Britain fell by 28,000. When we consider that EU immigrants make up around 5% of English NHS staff and 10% of all doctors, services could become strained in the near future.
